The smoke definitely thunders

What a fantastic weekend in Livingstone! I am going to be raving about this trip for sometime to come. I was sceptical whether one and a half days in Livingstone was worth sitting on a bus for 14 hours, but this trip will inspire me to plan more weekend trips out of Lusaka.

We arrived late Friday evening, after out coach bus almost died three times. It is low season so we had an eight-bed dorm at the backpacker’s hostel to ourselves; thank goodness, I’m not sure I would have been able to handle the chalet being cramped with eight people. We spent Friday night spent cooling down in the pool, watching the mist of the falls puff over the treetops, and enjoying Mosi’s – the local beer named after Victoria Falls (Mosi-oa-Tunya, meaning the smoke that thunders). I actually hate Mosi (bad hangover), but I couldn’t bring myself to dismiss the beer named after the fall, at the falls.

Saturday morning, after a wicked French toast breakfast, off we went to the falls. I couldn’t believe how different it looks, three months later. The Zambezi River is going crazy. According to some residents, the level of the river is 6 weeks too early in the rainy season. The mist got me wet the first time, but now the mist is now a downpour. In fact, it is so heavy that you can’t actually see the falls itself at some points. Now, my next plan is to return in September/October to see the falls during dry season; the river reduces enough that you can walk to the edge of the falls.

After shopping/haggling for crafts and eating a nshima dinner (I will need to devote a separate post on my love hate relationship with nshima – a maize paste, think tasteless mashed potatoes), we went back to the falls to catch the lunar rainbow. The park charged an additional admission (10$US!), but as a “resident” it costs all of 5 000 kwacha, or a little over 1$US. It was a cloudy night, but we were determined to sit by the riverbank and wait for the rainbow. And, sure enough, when a cloud-free patch of sky blew across, the rainbow, a full arc appeared at the top of the falls. A friend has an SLR camera and a 15-second exposure resulted in this pic. You had to be there to feel the coolness of the rainbow. I thought once I saw the rainbow, that would be it. Although the clouds blew over and the rainbow would only last a few minutes at a time, we sat on rocks and waited patiently for more clear sky because when the rainbow appeared, it was magic.

The rest of the night consisted of a slew of random activities that included climbing a baobab tree, checking out what $700 a night at the Zambezi Sun/Royal Livingstone Resort looks like, and more Mosi’s.

Early Sunday morning, we went on a safari. There is a small national park, Mosi-oa-Tunya Park along the Zambezi River. Since safari drives are typical, we decided to try a walking safari. There are no lions or other predators in the parks, so not too much could happen to a human. I don’t have much of an opinion on animals, but when we spotted some giraffes, I felt like I saw something that doesn’t actually exist – like dinosaurs or unicorns. Damn, they were cool. The remainder of the walk included sightings of white rhinos (there are only two in Zambia; we saw them and their two armed guards), impalas, zebras, wildebeests, baboons, monkeys, cranes, birds, spiders, and lots of poo.

I’m back in Lusaka now and going to sleep with magical things to dream about.